Tag Archives: Beer

Hop Project 78 and Brett Saison at Yazoo, one of the participating breweries in the Nashville Beer Festival 2014

The 4th Annual Nashville Beer Festival will be held two weeks from today, on Saturday, September 20 from noon-6 pm at East Park (in East Nashville, close to downtown). This is the last major beer event of the summer in Nashville (fall starts 3 days later).

Some dozen local breweries will participate, joining more than 30 other breweries from around the region, nation, and abroad. The complete list can be found here. Food will be available from at least six vendors (listed on the festival website) and there will be live music and other activities.

Tickets to the Nashville Beer Festival are $45 or $20 for designated drivers, and may be purchased here.

The Country Music Hall of Fame’s piano keyboard windows look down on the crowd at the 13th Annual Mafiaoza’s Music City Brewers Festival

If I don’t get this down while the blur is still fresh in my mind even more of it will slip away.

Last Saturday evening I attended Session B (and they don’t call it a session without reason) of the 13th Annual Mafiaoza’s Music City Brewers Festival downtown. Thousands? (I don’t have any actual numbers but it was crowded) of folks attended the event which included representatives from most local breweries, many from out-of-state, and a few from other countries: more than 60 in all.

clockwise from top left: jackalope taxidermy adorns the walls of the Jackalope taproom; mural on the wall outside the entrance – hard to miss if you’re driving south on 8th Ave.; the taproom on a Saturday afternoon

Jackalope Brewing Company is a small artisanal brewery and taproom ideally located on the edge of The Gulch in a small warehouse on 8th Ave. Jackalope opened their taproom on May 21, 2011 and began distributing their beer around town in January the following year – their beers can now be found at over 125 venues in Nashville and Middle Tennessee and as far afield as Chattanooga. The first female-owned brewery in Tennessee, Jackalope produces delicious beers and presents them with a unique, fanciful attitude.

Saturday morning I began cleaning out the garage, after years of procrastination and excuses. I made a false start two years ago and got through a dozen boxes of memorabilia before other demands took over and the job was abandoned. The room that theoretically is supposed to be a place to park the car soon soon reverted to its wild, primordial state of recycling bins, lawn care equipment, bicycle parts, and cardboard boxes upon plastic bins of the detritus of family life: all those items you have no need for today or this season or anymore but aren’t ready to part with, not yet.

Published in January 2012, this essay on the place of beer in contemporary culture and personal experience is an excellent example of new impulses in the realm of beer writing. Moving beyond tasting notes and informed by history, travel, and more than a few pints, Why Beer Matters is not so much an argument to establish the importance of beer as the title suggests, but rather a friendly discourse on a number of topics pertaining to our beloved potation, and why it seems to appeal to so many people, and mean so much to some.

from top left: menu on the mirror at Tennessee Brew Works; inside the taproom; one of the taproom’s many seating areas looks onto the brewery

One of the most recent arrivals on the Music City craft beer scene, Tennessee Brew Works inhabits a former printing warehouse on Ewing Avenue in what appears to be becoming Nashville’s brewery district: other denizens of the SoBro neighborhood include Yazoo, Jackalope, and Czann’s. TBW took possession of the property in February 2013, began brewing last August, and opened their Tennessee Taproom onsite in October.

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Lines on Ale (1848)

Fill with mingled cream and amber
I will drain that glass again.
Such hilarious visions clamber
Through the chamber of my brain -
Quantest thoughts - queerest fancies
Come to life and fade away;
What care I how time advances?
I am drinking ale today.